Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the two-term precedent set by George Washington by running for and winning a third and fourth term. Pressure for limiting terms followed FDR’s remarkable record. In 1951 the Twenty-Second constitutional amendment was ratified stating: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…” Accordingly, reelected Presidents must then govern knowing they cannot run again.
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By Thomas Jundt
On this day forty-four years ago, some 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and lecture halls for an event billed as a national environmental teach-in—Earth Day.
When he announced plans for the event, Wisconsin Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson, a longtime conservationist, hoped it would gather enough attention to pressure his colleagues into passing environmental legislation that he had been struggling to push through Congress. It did. President Nixon and policymakers responded to the growing environmental fervor with some of the most significant environmental laws in the nation’s history. Although Nixon once called environmental issues “just crap,” he was a savvy politician who understood that the public mood required some sort of action.
On 1 January 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law. The National Environmental Education Act, which mandated environmental education in public schools, was signed into law in October. By President Nixon’s executive order the Environmental Protection Agency came into being two months later, charged with overseeing the enforcement of federal environmental policies. The Marine Mammal Protection Act followed in 1972.
Girl Scout in canoe, picking trash out of the Potomac River during Earth Week. Photo by Thomas J. O’Halloran, 22 April 1970. Courtesy of Library of Congress
Environmentalists had urged such action for decades. The brutal light of atomic bomb flashes revealed a vulnerable planet, and key intellectuals soon recognized other ways that humans might destroy the earth. The head of the New York Zoological Society, Fairfield Osborn, warned of “man’s conflict with nature” in his 1948 bestselling book, Our Plundered Planet. Among the many planetary threats he addressed was the chemical DDT, made public shortly after the war. “The new chemical is deadly on many kinds of insects—no doubt about that,” he conceded. “But what of the ultimate and net result to the life scheme of earth?”
Big business was at the epicenter of this threat. “One of the most ruinous limiting factors is the capitalistic system,” William Vogt emphasized in his own 1948 bestseller, Road to Survival. “Free enterprise—divorced from biophysical understanding and social responsibility… must bear a large share of the responsibility for devastated forests, vanishing wildlife, crippled ranges, a gullied continent, and roaring flood crests.” Desire for stronger federal environmental regulations had been building long before Earth Day, and years before Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring in 1962.
The Earth Day era’s reforms proved inadequate. Rules and regulations that worked well initially were often less effective once corporate lawyers went to work figuring out how they could be exploited, and corporate lobbyists aimed their skills at softening their impact. As Denis Hayes, hired by Senator Nelson to organize Earth Day, said years later, the new laws looked good so long as you ignored things like “graft, corruption, huge campaign contributions, friendships forged on golf links, and all of the other stickiness in the system.”
The real world bore little resemblance to a political-science text. Indeed, in 1972 Nixon moved to undermine his own EPA. The president told his aid, John Ehrlichman, to have the EPA “say a number of things designed to shock the consumer that the cost of the environment will be very high and that the air quality laws are very impractical.” The EPA complied, shaking the public’s confidence enough to reduce or delay a number of antipollution regulations opposed by the automobile industry. “Whether it’s the environment or pollution or Naderism or consumerism,” President Nixon assured a gathering of Ford Motor Company executives, “we are extremely pro-business.”
None of this would have surprised many of the Americans who turned out for Earth Day. As ecologist Kenneth Watt observed in a speech at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, “More and more people are giving up on the system. This isn’t just the young people, or the poor, or the black people. I’ve been startled to discover the extent to which white, middle-class, suburban housewives have become so frustrated and are so full of despair about the ability to have any effect on the system that they’ve given up on it.” Mary Humphrey, of the activist group Ecology Action, at an EcoFair near Los Angeles concurred: “I don’t think you’ll find anyone who really thinks the government will do something.”
Perhaps the most telling admission that the political system was not up to the task was made by prominent Senate Democrat and conservationist Edmund Muskie of Maine. “The power of the people is in the cash register,” he proclaimed in an Earth Day speech. He was right.
In a study that asked those who attended Earth Day events in 1970 what actions they would take to help the environment, the plan most frequently cited, by 40% of Earth Day attendees polled, was to change their “consumer behaviors.” In comparison, only about 8% mentioned changes in activities such as joining others to take action.
For critics, this is a troubling example of businesses’ ability to co-opt the ideals of reformers and sell them back to them as organic soy lattes. They charge those who practice personal politics through consumption with avoiding the more difficult work required to organize for traditional politics.
But the retreat to eco-consumerism is understandable. Lacking political solutions, with a two-party system beholden to the very corporations pillaging the planet, citizens concerned about the environment have turned to alternative green consumption. They are not lazy or indifferent, and they are certainly not ignorant. The fact is policy and enforcement favor business at the expense of citizens and the environment.
Organics and other products believed to be environmentally friendly exploded in popularity as producers recognized a ready market in the millions who turned out for Earth Day events across the nation. Today, nearly all consumer products seem to offer a choice of greener alternatives, and for most Americans, consumer choice remains the most popular, if ironic, expression of environmental concern.
During the Cold War Americans heard about citizens in the Soviet Union who coveted Beatles records and blue jeans. Although it might have been a desperate and limited response, we comprehended that type of counterculture consumption as an under-standable reaction to political conditions Soviet citizens felt powerless to change. Green consumption is similar, limited yet understandable. With government in thrall to corporations and chamber of commerce ideologues, as we watch the seas rise, buying a Prius seems like the only game in town.
Thomas Jundt is a visiting assistant professor of history at Brown University, and author of Greening the Red, White, and Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar America.
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By Andrew J. Polsky
No Easy Day, the new book by a member of the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden on 30 April 2011, has attracted widespread comment, most of it focused on whether bin Laden posed a threat at the time he was gunned down. Another theme in the account by Mark Owen (a pseudonym) is how the team members openly weighed the political ramifications of their actions. As the Huffington Post reports:
Though he praises the president for green-lighting the risky assault, Owen says the SEALS joked that Obama would take credit for their success…. one SEAL joked, “And we’ll get Obama reelected for sure. I can see him now, talking about how he killed bin Laden.”
Owen goes on to comment that he and his peers understood that they were “tools in the toolbox, and when things go well [political leaders] promote it.” It is an observation that invites only one response: Duh.
Of course, a president will bask in the glow of a national security success. The more interesting question, though, is whether it translates into gains for him and/or his party in the next election. The direct political impact of a military victory, a peace agreement, or (as in this case) the elimination of a high-profile adversary tends to be short-lived. That said, events may not be isolated; they also figure in the narratives politicians and parties tell. For Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2012, this secondary effect is the more important one.
Wartime presidents have always been sensitive to the ticking of the political clock. In the summer of 1864, Abraham Lincoln famously fretted that he would lose his reelection bid. Grant’s army stalled at Petersburg after staggering casualties in his Overland campaign; Sherman’s army seemed just as frustrated in the siege of Atlanta; and a small Confederate army led by Jubal Early advanced through the Shenandoah Valley to the very outskirts of Washington. So bleak were the president’s political fortunes that Republicans spoke openly of holding a second convention to choose a different nominee. Only the string of Union victories — at Atlanta, in the Shenandoah Valley, and at Mobile Bay — before the election turned the political tide.
Election timing may tempt a president to shape national security decisions for political advantage. In the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt was eager to see US troops invade North Africa before November 1942. Partly he was motivated by a desire to see American forces engage the German army to forestall popular demands to redirect resources to the war against Japan, the more hated enemy. But Roosevelt also wanted a major American offensive before the mid-term elections to deflect attention from wartime shortages and labor disputes that fed Republican attacks on his party’s management of the war effort. To his credit, he didn’t insist on a specific pre-election date for Operation Torch, and the invasion finally came a week after the voters had gone to the polls (and inflicted significant losses on his party).
The Vietnam War illustrates the intimate tie between what happens on the battlefield and elections back home. In the wake of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Lyndon Johnson came within a whisker of losing the New Hampshire Democratic primary, an outcome widely interpreted as a defeat. He soon announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. Four years later, on the eve of the 1972 election, Richard Nixon delivered the ultimate “October surprise”: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced that “peace is at hand,” following conclusion of a preliminary agreement with Hanoi’s lead negotiator Le Duc Tho. In fact, however, Kissinger left out a key detail. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu balked at the terms and refused to sign. Only after weeks of pressure, threats, and secret promises from Nixon, plus renewed heavy bombing of Hanoi, did Thieu grudgingly accept a new agreement that didn’t differ in its significant provisions from the October version.
But national security success yields ephemeral political gains. After the smashing coalition triumph in the 1991 Gulf War, George H. W. Bush enjoyed strikingly high public approval ratings. Indeed, he was so popular that a number of leading Democrats concluded he was unbeatable and decided not to seek their party’s presidential nomination the following year. But by fall 1992 the victory glow had worn off, and the public focused instead on domestic matters, especially a sluggish economy. Bill Clinton’s notable ability to project empathy played much better than Bush’s detachment.
And so it has been with Osama and Obama. Following the former’s death, the president received the expected bump in the polls. Predictably, though, the gain didn’t persist amid disappointing economic results and showdowns with Congress over the debt ceiling. From the poll results, we might conclude that Owen and his Seal buddies were mistaken about the political impact of their operation.
But there is more to it. Republicans have long enjoyed a political edge on national security, but not this year. The death of Osama bin Laden, coupled with a limited military intervention in Libya that brought down an unpopular dictator and ongoing drone attacks against suspected terrorist groups, has inoculated Barack Obama from charges of being soft on America’s enemies. Add the end of the Iraq War and the gradual withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan and the narrative takes shape: here is a president who understands how to use force efficiently and with minimal risk to American lives. Thus far Mitt Romney’s efforts to sound “tougher” on foreign policy have fallen flat with the voters. That he so rarely brings up national security issues demonstrates how little traction his message has.
None of this guarantees that the president will win a second term. The election, like the one in 1992, will be much more about the economy. But the Seal team operation reminds us that war and politics are never separated.
Andrew Polsky is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Polity, his most recent book is Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War. Read Andrew Polsky’s previous blog posts.
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By David Sehat
On Aug. 6, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will lead a prayer rally in Houston despite criticism that his event violates the separation of church and state. Though Perry said recently that he felt “called” to run for the presidency, he also told a Christian radio show that the rally will not be political. “This is simply people calling out to God,” he said.
Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, looks at The New York Times decision not to break the Watergate story. Ritchie, who has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades, reveals that it was a series of mistakes, not just one, that led to The Washington Post breaking the story. Ritchie’s book, Reporting from Washington, was also ahead of the pack, identifying Deep Throat as being in the FBI months before Mark Felt confessed.
Watergate is back in the news thanks to the recent confessions of a former New York Times reporter, Robert M. Smith, and his Washington bureau editor, Robert H. Phelps, about how they failed to report a hot tip on the Nixon administration’s involvement in the cover-up. Preparing to leave the paper in August 1972, to attend law school, Smith held a farewell lunch with acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray, who revealed that his agents had found evidence of “dirty tricks” being employed by the Nixon reelection campaign, leading to the top levels. Smith reported this to Phelps, but he was leaving on a month-long vacation and let the story drop. The rest of the media has relished reporting on how the Times let the political story of the century slip away.
Of course, the rest of the media–with the notable exception of the Washington Post– fumbled the Watergate scandal as well. Even at the Post, the story was almost the exclusive property of two green reporters from the Metro section. Those who covered the national news dismissed the idea of presidential involvement in the Watergate burglary as being highly implausible. Washington correspondents may not have liked Richard Nixon, but they respected his intelligence and held it inconceivable that he would jeopardize his presidency by bugging his faltering opposition.
Without detracting from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s assiduous reporting, we know now that their chief inside information was coming from the FBI’s deputy director, W. Mark Felt. He systematically leaked in order to prevent the White House from derailing the FBI’s investigation. The insights Felt provided the Post kept the story alive for months.
When the Watergate burglars were arraigned, it was initially seen as a local police story. Since the New York Times’ Washington bureau only covered federal courts, the Times buried a short report deep inside the next day’s paper, while the Washington Post put it on the front page. Max Frankel, the Times’ Washington bureau chief, discouraged his correspondents from pursing Watergate. “Not even my most cynical view of Nixon had allowed for his stupid behavior,” Frankel later lamented. It went on that way for the rest of 1972, with the Post running story after story, and the rest of the media sharing the Times’ reluctance. Further clouding the Washington bureau’s judgment was its condescending attitude toward the Washington Post, which the New Yorkers regarded as little more than a provincial paper in a government town–a step or two above Albany. Despite Woodward and Bernstein’s prodigious output during the summer of 1972, Frankel insisted that their reporting failed to measure up to his standards of reporting. Small wonder, then, that Robert Smith’s tip never made it into the “paper of record.”
The New York Times finally got a handle on Watergate when it hired the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. In January 1973, Hersh scooped even Woodward and Bernstein by documenting how White House hush money had gone to the Watergate burglars. Reporters for other papers were developing their own leads and the rest of the pack piled on top. Ever since then–right up to the current revelations–Washington reporters have puzzled over why they missed the Watergate story for so long. The White House press corps came in for the harshest criticism, accused by former press secretary Bill Moyers of being “sheep with short attention spans.” But White House reporters, dependent on White House sources, were no more likely to uncover White House scandals than police reporters were to expose police graft. It took a couple of young, ambitious, local news reporters to think the unthinkable.
